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Displaying all posts under the topic of Remittances

February 27, 2015

Alicia Brindisi

1. Remittances: A number of large banks are no longer operating in certain countries in the global south in response to growing pressure from regulators to comply with rules on anti-money laundering and financing of terrorism. But this movement of "de-banking" means less money in the pockets of families who receive remittances as well as more cash traveling through informal channels. Center for Global Development...

December 9, 2014

Financial Access Initiative

Last night FAI had the pleasure of co-hosting a lively and informative panel discussion on the impact of cash transfers in international development with the Microfinance Club of New York. The panel (moderated by FAI's Timothy Ogden) included Paul Niehaus and Jeremy Schapiro, co-founders of GiveDirectly, Jenny Aker, Assistant Professor of Development Economics at The Fletcher School,...

November 7, 2014

Alicia Brindisi

1. Business Training: Previous evaluations show the effectiveness of business training programs is mixed at best. But a new paper finds (as with most things in life) it helps to have a friend. The World Bank - Development Impact ...

September 24, 2014

Laura Freschi

This week’s UN General Assembly meetings brought renewed attention to the set of global goals that will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) when they expire in 2015.

The latest draft of the new “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) is a kitchen-sink-like receptacle for the interests of every possible development constituency. There are some obvious and glaring problems with this. To focus on the plus side, though, this enormous brain dump allows space for some intriguing new thinking about what the global community can and should...

August 18, 2014

Timothy Ogden

We write a good deal about remittances because they are a big part of the financial lives of many poor households—on the sending and receiving end. Remittances receive a lot of attention in aggregate because so much money is flowing: a reasonable estimate is that more than $600 billion is moving annually and that the vast majority of that is flowing to poor households. On Friday...

August 13, 2014

Alicia Brindisi

In an interview with FAI, economist Jenny Aker explained that effective commitment savings products are those that balance flexibility and restrictions:

“If you give someone a savings product and it completely ties their hand, they don’t want to use it. They want to have a little bit of that tying of the hand so they can’t spend that money but they don’t want to be completely divorced from access to that money....

July 17, 2014

Timothy Ogden

Just about everyone agrees that international remittances should be cheaper. If you run the numbers on international remittance flows, incomes of recipients and transaction costs, you can make a case that reducing remittance costs would be among the highest ROI interventions for raising incomes of poor households in the developing world (and given what we’re learning about the use and benefits of cash transfers, there’s good reason to believe the money would...

July 15, 2014

Laura Freschi

As part of our ongoing effort to bring the worlds of research and practice closer together, we are experimenting with making academic work more readable and accessible by publishing and disseminating it in new formats. We’ve just released a paper by Michael Clemens and Tim Ogden on Medium, which we like so far for its clean, visually appealing, picture-heavy layout, and the way it allows readers to leave...